Notes: This is my first true lace pattern, my first pattern with beads, and it’s been a ton of fun. I’ve only frogged it once, which for me is a super bonus as I *always* end up frogging new shawls at least twice because I’m still a total newb.

That doesn’t mean this has been a flawless project. Oh no, not at all. I managed to get SSK (slip, slip, knit) and K2T (knit two together) mixed up on the 2nd chart and didn’t realize it until I was on row 19 out of 24. My primary excuse is was really late (early?) and I only glanced at the chart key once at the start of chart 2. Whoops! Honestly, my response was fuck it, that’s just how chart 2 is going to be done for all repeats. I’ll try to make sure chart 3 is correct because I think it will matter a bit more there.

Beads. The beads in this project are my new best friends and have been the only reason I haven’t had to frog this shawl multiple times. The way they line up is perfect for me to know exactly where I’m at on each row by comparing it to where the beads are on previous rows. I may just start adding beads to everything because the extra 15 seconds to place each bead is totally worth it compared to frogging a project a billionty times. Seriously, I’m the queen of fucking up shawls and having to frog them over and over. It’s not limited to shawls, either: Hats, mittens, socks, ponchos, scarves… everything really. Despite all of that I still love this craft and especially this pattern.

“Describe an important item from your childhood. Why was it important and where is it now?”

It was her eleventh Christmas that she go the pink teddy bear from her grandparents. Pink wasn’t really her color. Her initial reaction was confusion and a touch of disappointment. Actually that disappointment was strong. Her parents were there and expecting something more from her so she smiled and laughed in what she hoped was delight. Her mother asked if it had a name and she said something akin to not yet. She hadn’t decided if was going to have a name yet. Did it deserve that level of personalisation? Perhaps. It was so pink, that pepto-bismul pink… It wasn’t fair to the poor bear for her to judge it so. Her cheeks flushed with embarrassment for dismissing it so quickly. Sure it was a strange color but that made it stand out amidst her blues and purples.

She hugged it to her chest. It was soft and smelled of the cardboard box and fudge. Her grandmother so enjoyed sending things to them. It probably made her feel closer to them despite the infrequent and bridg trips her family made to visit. It wasn’t her faluth that she didn’t know her grand daughter well enough to know that pink was nearly as abhorrent as red or orange. She probably thought it was a safe color for a pre-pubescent girl. She likely was right and her grand daughter was too inflexible to be grateful.

That night the teddy bear stayed on her bed. It actually made a decent pillow. The size of the belly and arms, just a few inches larger than her head, made it comfortable to lean on. That and how soft it was though the fur tickled her ears and nose.

A week later she gave it a name. Lacie, the same as her half-sister. She loved Lacie, both the bear and her sister, in a rather abstract way. After all, it wasn’t Lacie’s fault she lived so far away and that her younger sister didn’t even know she existed until 3 years earlier. Lacie visiting always meant adventures and her parents taking time off from work. Lacie’s presence helped to bring them together. Her parents didn’t fight or get so angry. That bear could be a tiny piece of her sister and all the things she meant. Those nights when there was yelling and screaming and crying were the worst. The bear was there though, a tangible thing of comfort.

She would write to the bear and talk to it late night, imaging what it would be like to have her sister there instead. In a sense she was with a wee bit of herself within the bear, though her sister would never admit it.

A few months passed before her mother noted how much she fell asleep with the bear in her arms. “What’s your bear’s name?” she asked again.

“Lacie,” was all that the girl said. Her mother nodded slowly, understanding instantly the importance of that name. Fast forward fifteen years and she still has Lacie with her. She no longer sleeps with it, that right is now reserved for her cats who get as much comfort from the soft bear. They are smaller than it, a perfect companion for them to snuggle up to. Sometimes she still talks to Lacie, sharing her thoughts with that wee, tiny piece of her sister. She may not speak with the bear’s namesake but much like that abstract love her bear shifted into something deeper and real, so has the love for the person that is her sister. Each monologue to the smaller Lacie ends the same, “I love you, Lacie.”

Actually it is late but I can’t help it. I’ve changed jobs (OMG YAAAAAAAY!!!!) so now that my soul is no longer being sucked away by the monotony and zombifying outpatient job I may actually have more energy to write. After I figure out my schedule a bit more. I’ve mostly gone to nights which is awesome because night owl, whoooooootz!, but it’s been nights of intense learning for the new job and I also had a lab practical last week which was intense and two intense things at once make for a brain dead fae even with the new motivation and excitement of new things.

Right, so new thing is… working as a nurse in the county jail system! I’m actually an employee of Denver Health, a pretty damn awesome hospital that I hadn’t bothered to apply to before because I figured I wouldn’t get in and it was easier just to avoid that rejection. A previous coworker had talked up the jails and the team and I figured it wouldn’t hurt, especially given I had some rocking references to add to my resume (thank you Pam, Cynthia, Margaret, and Sloan!) Back to the place I’m actually working at… I get to work at both locations and wow is there a lot to learn. It’s not just the routine or the pace or the new methods of doing things or the people or the security or the Always Constant Reminders That Awareness Saves Lives or going back to overnights… it’s all of it. Everything. It’s also feeling like I’m doing something useful and still serving a population that is frequently thought of as lower than low. I get to learn! I get to do things on my own AND still work with a team. I get to have different experiences in that I have different floors to work on with their unique set ups and routines on top of the basic outline of the shift and variety is Mana to me. Mana from heaven raining down from a rainbow and tasting like skittles.

Have I mentioned that I’m excited? The over night crews have been pretty cool and welcoming which has been a relief. I wasn’t sure what to expect but they don’t seem to think I’ll completely ruin their shift so that’s something. I know several of the day people already from my Army thing and know that they are cool based on the reports I heard before I even applied and since I’ve started.

This is also my first go at being pool or PRN or whatever they call it here, and so far it’s not too bad. I have several planned things in the next month that I’ve already been able to plan around. There’s nearly a whole week I’m already booked up for and they were like, cool, whatevs, we’ll work around that, no problem. What kind of bizarre luck is all this and fuck yeah, I won the lottery.

I hope I’m this excited come a year from now. My coworkers think I’m too optimistic and naive and not toughened up enough. Here’s to hoping that when I look back at this in a year I’ll still be as excited and optimistic as I am now. Even at Bridge I never really lost my optimism for the work (sometimes the potential work only) that we could be doing and that each person that came through was worthy as a whole person even if they lied to and manipulated every person they encountered. I’ve been a nurse in psych for nearly 10 years and haven’t lost that optimism yet. I actually want to prove them wrong that one can work in jail and not be toughened up to the point of cynicism. That’s my goal. Maintain my attitude and enjoy my work. 🙂

Like this:

Look! Another post inspired by Brene Brown, this time from Daring Greatly. “What’s worth doing even if I fail?” She whispered this phrase to herself as she was walking out on stage at her 2012 TED talk. I think I have to step back further from where she’s at though and just start with “what’s worth doing?” What is something that needs to be done, what is something that I feel I need to do? I want to do some sort of deep introspection and thinking here but honestly I am too internally blocked to go that far. That will eventually be my answer to “what’s worth doing even if I fail?” but I’m not quite there yet.

That leads to the question of what is worth doing in a more general sense. Superficially I want to create whether it is to create a difference, create an object, or create a thought.

Creating a difference is important to me because I have always desperately wanted to be needed. So much of my self-worth and identity is tied into being a helper, being available for people when they have little else. It’s probably the primary reason why I’ve been entrenched in mental health nursing since I became a nurse nearly a decade ago. (Side note-holy shit that was 10 years ago!) If there’s one group of people that don’t have much it’s the people described as severe and persistently mentally ill. All of the agencies I have worked at served a population of people that were homeless or only one flat tire away from it. I could be something for them: a smile, a greeting, a “how are you?” with the actual desire to know, a quiet presence to cry with, or a guide when the voices, self-contempt, or anxiety got to be too much. (This is where my tendency towards over functioning comes in but that’s a blog for another day)

You see, in working at places where my need to be needed was satisfied with little effort on my part I was able to continue to do without having to stretch out and be uncomfortable. Sure there are always the discomforts of learning new systems, new people, and figuring out my place in the system but I could always figure out a way to create a difference because there was always at least one person around that needed something.

Creating things has become a large focus for me in my knitting and crochet projects. I can make things that are useful and have an art to them. They aren’t perfect but often I’m the only one that knows how imperfect they are. Other people see the things I’ve made and appreciate them and all is good in the world. I’ve even slowly been pushing past my fears of different techniques and projects because this is a challenge I can do. If it doesn’t work out I can just rip back the yarn and watch my work shrink away until the mistakes disappear. (Note that more often than not this is an accidental thing and results in cursing at the tiny loops until I get everything back to where it’s supposed to be.) I can take chances and risks with little waste except my time and patience. This is a safe place to challenge myself and do something daring.

Lastly, creating a thought is actually the other two forms of creating mixed into one. A thought is an unformed object budding from someone who has been bit by the inspiration bug. I’m still working on how to do that with any consistency. There’s an unhealthy level of criticism and fear around creating a thought… oh. Right. I think that is probably what I need to focus more on. A something that is so important and worth doing despite the risk of failure would be an act of creation so long standing as to inspire thought, discussion, debate. Writing is one of those things for me.

Perhaps that is enough honesty and being vulnerable for the night. I know that my something worth doing despite the risk of failure is doing something that can inspire thoughtful discussion, ideas, and perhaps action. It’s still a rather broad concept at this point in my journey but I now have a direction to wander while I let this percolate a bit more. Hopefully the process of finding out what’s worth doing even if you fail isn’t so vague or hidden from yourself as what I’ve found my something to be.

Earlier today, well yesterday by the time this is posted, I started a new audio book Rising Strong by Brene Brown. I’ve had it on my phone for several months now but only just recently felt like I was maybe ready to hear her words. I’ve got several of her other books and have read some, but not all, of them. Honestly they have been too much for me to process all at once. They inspire deep introspection and assessment of yourself in a most painful way. The primary focus is on shame, guilt, blame, fear, vulnerability, trauma, self-doubt, and avoidance. Heavy, heavy topics, especially for those who have, ahem, avoided such intense personal awareness.

Despite the heavy topics I felt that this book was easier to listen to than to read as the slower pace enabled me to process the implications more. Also, hearing Brene speak directly about her own experiences and stories that others have trusted her with makes it feel more intimate. There’s power in a person speaking their own story, their own struggles and triumphs. It’s also relieving to hear that someone with such a strong background in social work has to battle through understanding these hard concepts and that it’s not an automatic thing for her. She has been able to learn and gain greater awareness and understanding so that she can recognize when she’s falling into the trap of blaming, getting even, or avoiding what she is experiencing.

There are people who figured out how to be vulnerable and aware of their self-worth but there is at least one other person who hasn’t figured that out for every one who has. The ones that have already do something that is both obvious and hard; they write out their story each day. It doesn’t have to be for a particular amount of time or have a true focus or method of narration. Some people write short stories, some draw it out, some use blogs or diaries, some write letters that will never be sent. All of these are things I’ve encouraged patients to do in the past. “Write out what you’re feeling, give yourself permission to be honest with yourself.” It’s so easy to give the advice, not so easy to follow it yourself.

I’m going to try this idea. Writing for just a little bit of time, sometimes just for me but other times it will be to share. It may not always be on this blog but one of the others I’ve got, depending upon what’s more appropriate. Some of my stories for the day would be what Brene called “shitty first drafts” SFD for short and they won’t be shared. Some may be fiction narratives for me to explore what’s going on in my head. Others may be rants or complaints or pleas for understanding. Regardless I feel that bringing this whole blogging idea back to life is probably healthy. Plus, I’m starting a new chapter in my work life and since I can’t do something funky with my hair I can at least make some other visible change in my life. Blogging is visible, if less so than my hair, and is probably far more likely to result in moments of revelation. Those are pretty cool when they happen even if they are infrequent.

Ender’s Game is, for good reason, considered one of the best sci-fi books out there. Orson Scott Card (OSC) wrote the book in 1985 and it is what catapulted him into fame, despite the fact that most people who have read his fantasy work have told me that they prefer that over Ender’s Game. Personally I found Ender’s Shadow to be superior to Ender’s Game but thought both were good reads and a really interesting introduction to sci-fi. Card has continued to write in that universe and many others. However, he has also diverted off the path of just being a writer and is also using his name and money to support and promote other causes, primarily anti-LGBT and equality campaigns. His name is big enough, the amount of money he’s spent large enough and the timing of the movie is just right so that equality and LGBT activists have called for a boycott of any and everything that Card has touched. Really, Card has said a lot of stuff over the years and supported enough groups that are against the rights of others that I can think of very view people I know who wouldn’t offend Card. So then the question I must answer is why did I go to see the movie? Two things: The first is that he will not get enough money from my ticket to make up for me not wanting to support a new sci-fi film. We aren’t seeing enough of those coming from Hollywood and there’s a chance that if this one does well then they’ll look at doing others. Hopefully those others won’t include a writer who is as much of a dick as Card is. The second is that I was really curious to see if they’d be able to pull it off. Ender’s Game is such an internally driven book where few of the motivations can be easily played out by anyone and it would be ridiculous to have a character do voice over through most of the movie just to explain what’s going on.

For those like me who don’t like the idea of supporting Card much at all but do want to see the movie you can always donate money or your time to a GLBT/human rights group. You could do that even if you don’t go and see the movie, too.

Right, so the review part.

To get it out of the way – I did not like it as an adaptation of the book Ender’s Game. However, if it were just a standalone movie that took its cue from the book I’d find most of it to be pretty cool, good even. That was not the case though. Consider yourselves warned, there be spoilers beyond this point.

SPOILERS I TELL YOU! SPOILERS! (I hope that sounded as cool in your head as it did in mine.)

Ender Wiggin is not just smart, he’s a genius on par with Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark. Actually, all of the kids that were candidates for battle school are geniuses like that. It was never made clear in the movie that these kids are waaaaaaay more intelligent than their teachers. It wasn’t made clear that they were all expected to be able to fight as much with their bodies as their brains. It also wasn’t made clear that they spent a long time on the battle school. It wasn’t clear that these kids start at 5 or 6 years old and don’t leave until they’re between twelve and fourteen. Yeah, they had to compress some of that in the movie, okay, I’ll give them that. But there is no way in this world that they could have compressed it to fit into less than a year and that they had twenty eight days from the last Dragon battle to the start of the “real” war like what was displayed on their countdown timer of doom. That made the whole thing even less likely. That was the point that I decided they really didn’t know what they were doing.

Oh, it was never made clear either that these students were expected to be able to kill and that it was one of the things that got them into battle school, that ability to do so. Ender got in because he killed the first kid. He stayed in and was recognized as the person they were looking for because he killed Bonzo but hated himself from the moment that he realized he was going to do it. Bonzo didn’t trip, he was killed. If they had done those sequences right then the dialogue with Valentine where she tells him that he isn’t like Peter because he has to be able to love someone before he can kill them would make so much more sense. As it is they just sort of hang there.

Once the movie goes up to the battle school, we’re up there and never hear anything more about what’s going on down on the ground. There was so much politicking going on down there and Ender’s siblings were THE movers and shakers. They did so much and there wasn’t even a nod to it in the movie. Bah!

They decided to compress all of the “simulated” battles to less than a half-dozen, okay, fine, I can understand that. However, there was no reason whatsoever to move EVERYONE to a planet outside the solar system! They even threw around the word ansible and communication even if they didn’t explain it. Being closer to the fight meant nothing AND it got rid of the point that this whole damn thing had been planned years and years and years in advance. The *only* reason for making that change was so Ender could walk outside his little safe place and find the queen’s egg, which screwed up the ending in so many ways I can’t count them all. The way they showed Ender finding the random Queen egg just laying around WITH a dying queen to protect it did two things: showed that there were probably more formics living in other places and that Ender didn’t complete genocide and made the entire fleet appear to be entirely incompetent for not making sure the area around their base was clear, at least far enough that a kid couldn’t walk for a few minutes and run into a formic. You know, an alien that has a strong history of trying to kill humans without asking any questions? GAH! That was just bad. Bad, bad, bad.

A few things they almost got right – the relationship between Ender and Petra. I think Hollywood actually wanted to make it into a love thing but someone came by and said “no, that’s going to get you killed more than this whole Card thing is,” so they didn’t. Instead they made it borderline, which I can deal with. Petra rescues Ender, makes him look awesome and they work well as a team. Alai gets named and the lesson he teaches Ender about peace is there. Bean is mentioned though it’s more like the screenwriters were told to name one of the kids “Bean” and to make him smaller and spin around in the battle room.

Oh the battle room. You know, I will forgive them for how they portrayed it. Yeah, fine, they completely screwed up with the design of the school and how the battle room was supposed to look and how the whole gravity thing worked there. I never expected them to get it right anyway. However, I do think that the visuals we got from their version was pretty damn awesome and much more visually pleasing than the big white/gray/black room that I had from the book. I don’t think movie audiences would have been satisfied with a battle room that was true to the books.

I’ll even give them the few battles they showed. They did a lot better will all of that than I had expected them to. I hope to see some of the things they learned from filming those scenes pop up in other movies because it was really fun.

I’ve totally lost all my steam here, so I’m just going to leave it at my previous assessment. If I hadn’t gone in knowing it was supposed to be Ender’s Game it would have been a whole hell of a lot better. Generic space sci-fi movie gets 4/5 stars, Ender’s Game adaptation gets 1.5/5 stars. They intentionally got too many things wrong for me to give it any higher of a rating.

Professor Elyn R. Saks is a woman with an impressive number of awards, titles and accomplishments tied to her. She is a professor of psychology, psychiatry and behavioral health for the University of Southern California Gould School of Law as well as the assistant dean of research there. She is also an adjunct professor for the University of California, San Diego, school of medicine, and a psychoanalyst with the New Center for Psychoanalysis (Saks 2013). She recently was awarded the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for her creativity and immeasurable contribution to the law especially as it relates to mental health patient rights and ethics. Through all of this she also suffers from schizophrenia, a life-long thought disorder that has left her hospitalized twice in England and once again in the United States. Her passion as an advocate in the field of mental health stems from her own experiences within the system as a patient and again as a lawyer for those who have found themselves a part of the mental health system. As if that wasn’t enough for any one person to balance she is also a cancer survivor. Sak’s story is one of an indomitable will and resilience in the face of multiple setbacks and difficulties. In 2007 she published her memoir, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness, her retelling of her own recovery and her desire to chip away at the social stigma of severe mental illnesses like schizophrenia . Her retelling of her insights even at the worst of her psychosis is something which any mental health professional and lawyer should pause to consider, and her capacity to not only remember what she experienced when her symptoms were at their worst but also to talk to others about those experiences makes her the ideal advocate for mental health patients everywhere in the United States.

Saks has had a variety of experiences as a patient with paranoid schizophrenia and severe depression, some good and some bad. Her first hospitalization occurred while she was in a post-graduate philosophy program at Oxford. She was severely depressed and experiencing many paranoia

and psychosis including what is called ideas of reference and influence, which means she both thought that other beings were inserting thoughts into her head and that she was making things happen like killing people with her thoughts. Her thinking was so disorganized to the point that she could not string together a full, coherent thought. Her sentences, or what passed as a sentence when she was that sick, were full of incomplete sentences and unrelated words with the only accompanied association being rhymes or puns. These symptoms became a hallmark of her later psychosis, becoming more and more difficult to control as well as much more severe and debilitating, a waking nightmare as she has come to describe it (Dvorsky). During her time in England she resorted to such behaviors as burning herself and wandering alone in the tunnels beneath the hospital she was receiving treatment in. An interesting thing about the way the English psychiatric hospital system works is that despite her significant symptoms and self-harming behavior she was never once placed in seclusion or in restraints. The hospital doors were always open and every patient had the right to leave or stay and had a say in their own treatment, including whether they would take medications or not. Her case was not anything special; England had not used restraints or seclusion in their mental health treatment in over 200 years. Saks later compared this quite humane and compassionate treatment theory to what she experienced in the United States and used it as a reference in articles and books that she later published while in law school at Yale and later in her career. Her hospitalizations in the United States included wild swings between two very different systems of treatment: frequent use of restraints, seclusion and forced medications or redirection and encouragement to use coping skills to play out her anger and frustration. However, none of her treatment programs in the United States encouraged her to explore just what it was that she was experiencing in her psychotic state. Actually, they did the exact opposite in that the doctors and nurses were startled and scared of her and her delusions and psychosis and discouraged her from saying out loud what was going on in her head. This in direct contrast to what had been encouraged during her stay in England where she had succeeded in continuing to work on some of her masters level research and

essays even while she was hospitalized. She had felt heard, understood, and supported and therefore her recovery was faster and her time in the English system of treatment for mentally ill individuals was a relatively positive experience for her. She had very little that was positive to say about the American treatment system. It was a lesson and awareness that continues to influence her even now.

Another hard lesson for her was discussing her concerns and observations with psychiatric and law professionals who had a very different view of what was beneficial for psychotic and other mental health patients than what her experience showed her. She discussed the use of mechanical restraints with a professor she greatly respected. She was arguing that regardless of whether someone was psychotic or not the use of restraints is degrading and dehumanizing. Rather than understanding she discovered that he held the same opinion as most every other psychiatric professional in 1980s, “Elyn, you don’t really understand. These people are psychotic. They’re different from me and you. They wouldn’t experience restraints the same way we would” (NPR). Saks, at that time still a student in the Yale law program, was unable to tell her professor that his opinion regarding the difference between a psychotic and non-psychotic individual was wrong, that there was no difference between a psychotic and non-psychotic individual (NPR). She knew then that if she was to tell any of her professors about her own mental illness then her chances of being taken seriously as a lawyer were few. The stigma of mental illness was, and continues to be, so strong that even well educated and sympathetic people viewed themselves as different from anyone with a psychiatric illness. The us and them mentality does not stop at the border of a psychiatric treatment facility either. Within the micro-communities of inpatient hospitals there is an unvoiced hierarchy. People with less obvious illnesses like bulimia or anxiety or even depression considered themselves better, in some ways more human, than those with schizophrenia or other thought type disorders. Even during her own time in several inpatient facilities Saks had much of the same opinions. People who scared her were not the same as her, she was better than them, she didn’t need to be in the same place as them. She was confronted by her own

discrimination when another person in the same inpatient facility told her that he knew he didn’t need to be there any longer because he was nowhere near as sick as she was. He was too sane to be around someone like her.

Saks could have taken that sort of information and just tossed it away. She was still floridly psychotic when she was told this, but she had enough insight to know that she needed to take that sort of thinking into consideration. The next decade or so the mantra of “I don’t belong here because I’m not that sick” was something that stuck with her and which she used over and over to convince her providers that she needed to try getting off medications, that she was okay, that she really wasn’t someone with a mental illness. She was just not as good as everyone else at controlling her reactions and interactions with the very scary things that were going on in her brain. She was convinced that everyone from the other law students to her psychotherapists had the same sort experiences of killing thousands of people with their thoughts and that they were personally killed and tortured many times over by the same demons she fought with. They just knew how to keep quiet about it. Up until the 1990s even when she was on medications that helped with the delusions and paranoia she was experiencing she still had a lot of breakthrough symptoms. She described the experience as always having to fight to keep the door between the scary, intrusive thoughts and her own thoughts and what was going on in the real world. She could always feel or hear the scary things, they were always there at the edge of her consciousness trying to push through and torment her further. She had not really known anything else and so it was not a large leap of logic to think that every other person had the same problem of trying to keep nightmares from taking over their way of thinking. All that changed, her entire perspective changed, when she started on some of the newer antipsychotic medications that were developed in the 1990s. Saks described her experience in an interview she did with NPR in February, 2013, “I think I only really came to terms with having the illness and being careful about how I structured my life, ironically, when I got on really good medication. It made me realize that, you know, these

chaotic and violent thoughts weren’t things that everybody had.” Suddenly she wasn’t always aware of those nightmares knocking on some internal door in her mind. Her thinking was much more clear, she was less tired and much relieved that she didn’t have to fight to hold that door closed every moment she was awake.

Once Saks stopped fighting her illness she found that she was not as confined by it as she had been every day that she had struggled against it. Rather than being Elyn Saks, the lady who was always in fear of being the crazy bag lady muttering and yelling at buildings, she discovered she was able to be Professor Elyn Saks, a successful lawyer, teacher and good friend who happened to occasionally need to take some space for herself. Once she no longer wasted so much energy fighting to keep her thoughts straight or worrying over whether anyone else could see that she was struggling so much she was able to do more for herself. She began a program to become a psychoanalyst. She started dating again and married a very supportive man. She established herself as an expert in the law as it applies and relates to psychiatric cases through the research and publication of many books and reports focusing on the complicated ethics that often surround them. With colleagues at the University of California, San Diego she has started a research program to find other high functioning individuals with schizophrenia. With the release of her memoir and her even more recent TED talk she has joined the dozens of other individuals who advocate for recognizing and challenging the stigma related to mental illness. She has become so well known for her advocacy that celebrities like Glenn Close gave her a shirt that says “Schizophrenia” after asking her to be on the board of her nonprofit organization Bring Change 2 Mind (NPR Day). She has demonstrated that a diagnosis like schizophrenia is not a sentence to a life of little fulfillment or joy but is rather something that an individual can learn to work with and around to lead a completely productive life full of accomplishments and community service. Saks’s continued contribution to both the field of psychiatry and psychiatric law is one that completely contradicts the “grave” prognosis her psychiatrists gave her many years ago. Saks has been exceptionally successful in

her life in spite of her mental illness. “There are not schizophrenics. There are people with schizophrenia and these people may be your spouse, they may be your child, they may be your neighbor, they may be your friend, they may be your coworker” (Saks 2012).

Like this:

There is a prescriber at work who has made an interesting impact on me and I’m not sure if she is even aware. I have become much, much more conscientious about now I say that I don’t actually know the answer to one of her questions. When I first started working at the ATU I received some feedback from a coworker basically saying that this prescriber was more or less pissed that I was okay with saying those three words “I don’t know.” It was unprofessional and unacceptable. Since then I have learned, especially when speaking with her, to make sure that I always answer with something else. this usually means things like, “you know, I’m uncertain about that but I think so and so may know. It has also forced me to pay a lot more attention to what people say about a clients behavior or what’s going on with them because I don’t want to be caught saying anything resembling I don’t know if it’s at all humanly possible.Her opinion of me and my capabilities have shifted over the last six months or so. I don’t believe she is hesitant to hear what I have to say about what’s going on with a client. She trusts that if she asks me to do something I’ll get it done or at least do my darnedest to make it happen. I’m surprised sometimes when I consider what her opinion of me was a year ago and what it has become and it makes me realize how much changing one small bit of speech can really do for you. methinks it’s a lesson that can be applied to multiple parts of my life. Now just to figure out what other key phrases I need to be way of.